There is a wonderful book called Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers by the scientist Robert Sapolsky. The thesis of it is that if you are a zebra, you are on the menu for the average lion out on the savannah. When you see a lion coming towards you, you need stress and you need to get stressed fast. Zebras need to be afraid. They need to move quickly. They get as much sugar into the system as possible, get the heart beating rapidly and pump the whole system with adrenalin, so they can move as quickly as possible. Within a couple of minutes, either they will have got away or they will have been caught and killed. So, they only need to stay stressed for a couple of minutes.

We human beings however, can keep it going for a couple of months or years, so we get ulcers. The stress reaction is sustained through our papañca, through our conceptual thought and our capacity to remember and imagine. We start incessantly imagining, can’t let go of painful things in the past, or what might happen in the future. We create ongoing anxiety, maintain the stress reaction hour after hour, day after day, week after week. We make ourselves ill with anxiety, restlessness, rage, rapacity and depression.

So, if you want to avoid ulcers you need to work on papañca. Papañca (conceptual proliferation) is the habit of buying into our thoughts, believing in them and creating images of past and future, and going off and inhabiting them — building castles in the air and going to live there.

 We find ourselves in the situation: “me here and the world out there.” There is a state of tension between the two, either tension with something I want which I haven’t got, or something I’m afraid is going to get me and want to get away from. There is a duality. And that subject-object duality is rigidly fixed into place, and the dukkha arising from that. This whole process, from the beginning with the simple perception through to the end with “me here” and “the world out there”, happens very quickly. So, learning to track this process and seeing how it begins requires the development of mindfulness and wisdom. The mind has to be trained not to follow the habitual pathways of papañca.

When you see the mind has wandered off into some kind of conceptual labyrinth, into trains of thought and association, take the trouble to follow it back. This is the practice of following the string of thoughts and associations back to its origin. It might not seem a terribly fruitful exercise, but in my experience, it is very revealing. Over and over again we realize that the mind gets caught up in excitements or fantasies, fears and anxieties, or gets lost in rewriting the past, and that all this is completely void of substance.

We also go back and revisit mistakes we made, glorious moments, or things which were memorable or painful — we re-inhabit them and bring them to life. Whenever we are aware that the mind is caught up in a proliferation, we need to take the trouble to catch that process like netting a butterfly. Catch that thought. Actually, a butterfly is a very appropriate symbol, since the Greek word “psyche” means not just “the mind” but “butterfly”. So, a psychologist is someone who studies this very butterfly nature.

So, catch that particular fluttering piece of papañca, and follow the sequence of thoughts and associations back to where they came from. Every time we will notice that it was started by just a random thought that popped into the mind — there was a smell from the kitchen which triggered the memory of a particular food, or the sight of somebody’s shawl triggered the memory of Aunt Matilda’s dress. Following it back, we realize that it was just a smell, just a sound, just a random memory. That is all. When we get to the source, the origin, it is utterly unburdensome, uncomplicated.

The further you trace it back to the source, the less there is a sense of a “me here” and “the world out there” – a solidly, definitely divided experience. There is just hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, touching. “In the heard there is only the heard, in the hearing there is only the hearing.” The same with seeing, smelling, tasting, touching. There is no sense of self embedded within that. It is just the world as it is experienced.

We tend to think, “I am in here, the world is out there, and I am perceiving the world.” But I find it extremely helpful to keep recognizing that we don’t experience the world — we experience our mind’s representation of the world. This is something that the Buddha pointed to (e.g., at S 2.26, S 35.116): “That in the world by which one is a perceiver of the world, a conceiver of the world — this is called “the world” in the Noble One’s discipline. And what is it in the world though which one does that? It is with the eye, the ear, the nose, the tongue, the body and the mind.” That is “the world” in terms of the Buddha’s teaching. Obviously, we can talk about this planet as being the world, or the stars and galaxies and space being the world. But it is important to recognize that when we are trying to live in a reflective way, develop the qualities of wisdom and understanding and free the heart, the most helpful way of understanding the world is just exactly as I have been describing — the world is sights, sounds, smells, taste, touch, thought. That is the world because that is the world as we know it.

I’m not saying that the whole world is an illusion conjured up by us as individuals. There is a substrate. There is a basis on which our perceptions are formed. But what we know about the world is constructed from the information that our senses weave together. That is the coordinating capacity of the mind. The mind is the sixth sense which draws the first five senses together and coordinates them. The world the mind creates is the world that we know. The world is put together by our minds. These perceptions are all we can know. All we have ever known has been through the agency of this mind. We create a world where things have colors — this is black, that is brown — but these are constructed realities, fabricated perceptions. They don’t have any intrinsic existence. “Personhood,” “individuality”, our name is a construct, as is our notion of individuality. We construct these things and live with them for useful reasons. But the more we take them to be absolute truths, then the more we are stuck in sīlabbata parāmāsa, attachment to conventions.

When we recognize that the world is created through our thoughts and perceptions, that we build this world, that it is a caused, dependent thing, we can also see that it arises and therefore ceases. It is a process that is known through our awareness, and it is in this awareness that “the world ends”.

Once the world is known for what it is, once we have seen the comings and goings of the world — the world is caused, the world arises, the world ceases — the heart is able to be freed from identification with the world, the heart is liberated from the world.

Ajahn Amaro
Excerpts from a longer article titled: “Puncture Your Papañca”: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12671-021-01746-x

The article was transcribed from a talk titled: “Conceptual Proliferation (Papañca)”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzUPNw8YTCY